


Rising From The Dead

by MsMockingbird



Series: The Mockingverse [26]
Category: Avengers (All Media)
Genre: F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-05-03 22:11:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14578719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsMockingbird/pseuds/MsMockingbird
Summary: Mockingbird and the Winter Soldier survive an ambush in Romania.They just want the bad guys to think they didn’t.Now on the run, who will find them first?The Avengers?Or the people who ‘killed’ them in the first place?





	1. Are You Sure?

**Author's Note:**

> ‘I’m taking a fic break,’ I said. 
> 
> ‘I need to focus on my original works,’ I said. 
> 
> Liar

When the Romanian salvage crew at the Constanta docks uncovered the bodies, Clint and Natasha both fell to their knees. Sam and Thor helped them back to the Quinjet. 

Captain America, grim and cold, stayed, watching as the two charred corpses were hauled out onto the wet cement. The smaller of the two -- not that there was much left of either -- was wrapped in the tattered remains of a black leather jacket. The other one sported a few scraps of red fabric--   
and two joined strips of armour, still burnished chrome even after the fire and the warehouse collapsing on top of them. A pool of melted metal lay under that side of the body. 

Bruce Banner edged over to Cap, who had pulled up his cowl and pulled his shield around to hold in front of him, submerging Steve's grief and pain in Cap's diamond will. Wordlessly, Bruce held up his scanner/phone and gestured at the remains. Cap nodded and Bruce knelt to run the equipment over each one in turn. The display flickered and turned...green. Bruce dropped his head, breathing hard, then looked up at his team leader. 

"It's them," he whispered, tears in his gentle voice. "It's Mockingbird and the Winter Soldier." 

**** 

Captain America stomped back onto the Quinjet and closed the hatch behind him. "Sam, you can take off." 

"Make sure you fly like you're sad," Tony chimed in from one of the side computer stations. 

"Copy, I'll try to dip the wings in a grieving manner," Sam called back. 

Cap turned around and pulled down his cowl again. He had a smudge of ash on his cheek, looking like combat paint. He looked straight at Natasha and Clint, who were leaning over the same Starkpad. On the table in front of them   
were the remains of the leather jacket and the scraps of metal. 

"Before we get too far, are you _sure_?" He pulled Bruce in with a flashing look. 

Banner nodded briskly. "Both the corpses were male; neither was Barnes." 

"These are from James' arm but they were pried off by something very sharp," Natasha gestured at the metal strips. "Like Bobbi's blades." 

Clint looked up. "And here's the kicker: the jacket's got mods, concealed sheathes for her batons. No batons and you'd need a few hundred more degrees for a few more hours to melt them." 

Steve waved at Tony. "Where are their phones?" 

"They bricked themselves last night, about the same time we lost their transponders. From the final aborted reading, I'd say limited duration high intensity EMP took them out. Barnes' arm would go down too but it can repair itself to at least basic function in a matter of hours. They're probably at the bottom of the bay; Jarvis has a few submersible drones out looking for them." 

Steve sat down at the table and stared at the jacket, the metal. "So, they got captured, or nearly, big fire fight--" 

"Then fire in truth," Thor rumbled. 

Steve nodded. "Which means they were made the minute they hit the ground which means you were right Nat and there's a mole somewhere down the information chain." He ran his hand through his hair, leaving a fresh ashy streak in the blond mass. "Right now _we_ know they are alive and so would the people who tried to kill them, given I'd guess those bodies are henchmen. I mean, I hope they are." 

"They haven't tried to make contact so either they have a long game running or they can't," Nat supplied, tapping her foot gently. 

"I'm going to land in Bucharest and we can regroup there, 'kay Cap?" Sam called from the cockpit, to Cap's waved assent. 

"Small mercies, they are two of the three people on the planet I'd trust the most to survive something like this," Bruce said, smiling shyly at Nat as he did. She smiled back but there was strain visible at the corners of her eyes. 

"It must have gone down fast, and surprised them," Clint said, slowly. "For neither of them to get a message out? To have to fake their deaths like this? Yeah, they're both survivors but...Bobbi loves--loved--that jacket. She wouldn't   
sacrifice it without an extreme reason." He shook his head. "My Hawkeye-sense says: they aren't okay." He sat down heavily, resting his chin on his hands and staring at Bobbi's jacket like he could make it speak to him. 

"James, sestra, where are you?" Natasha whispered. 

***** 

"Sport, am I glad you can't get infections or bleed to death easily," Bobbi muttered. "This is distinctly not sterile." 

"Shut up and dig the damn bullet out, Barton," Bucky hissed through gritted teeth. 

He was lying on a thin bed of hay over packed dirt, his shirt pulled up to his neck, exposing a bullet wound high on the left side of his chest. Filthy water dripped down the cold stone walls of the ancient barn, the only light   
coming from a small window high on the wall above. Bobbi, one leg heavily splinted and bandaged at the ankle, sat next to him, her combat batons with their blades extended on the hay next to her. 

They were both comprehensively grimy, in ill-fitting clothes and streaked with blood in odd places. Bobbi was grey faced with fatigue and Bucky had the pinched and exhausted look he and Steve got when they were calorie   
deprived.

Bobbi winced, then picked up one of her batons and placed the blade tip at the bullet wound. "I'm really sorry about this, Buck," she whispered and then pushed the diamond coated blade downwards till it jarred on his breast bone. He coughed out a strangled noise of pain, blood spotting his lips. Bobbi grabbed his bionic left hand and pulled it up. "Hold this still," she snapped, tilting the baton at an angle. He locked his arm into place, still as a statue. She touched the other baton to the wound and did the same thing, pulling another gasping cry out of him. That one she held tilted with her left hand, pulling the edges of the wound open, groping in the hay for another tool with her right. 

She came up with-- 

"Are those pink tweezers?" Bucky choked out. 

"I grabbed what I could grab, Bucky. You have a toxic bullet millimeters from your heart and its not being a super soldier that saved you, it was the super Kevlar. That I developed might I remind you." She was probing at the wound as   
she spoke, clearly trying to distract him. Blood welled up and ran down his chest on to his stomach, staining the crisp lines of his abdominals crimson. 

"What do you want, a fucking cookie?' he gasped, breathing through his nose. 

"Well, yeah, actually. One of those double chocolate ones with the marshmallows and the cayenne pepper that Clint brings back from that place on 74th, dunked in ice cold 2% cut with some of that goats milk I use for cream   
cheese icing--got you, you little _asshole_ ," Bobbi crowed, pulling the deformed slug out of the wound to a fresh gout of blood. She stared at it with disgust, then dropped it carefully into an pill bottle set on the floor. "We are crazy lucky that hit bone on the way in." 

"I'm lucky you were along for the ride," Bucky muttered collapsing backwards, resting his head on the hard ground. "You have steady hands." 

Bobbi fished a small plastic wrapped bundle of thin, cheap hand towels out of the hay and cleaned them both up as best she could, using one of them and some scotch tape to cover over his chest wound. It had already scabbed   
up and stopped bleeding. Bucky sat up and pulled down his shirt, a shapeless black and grey polyester mass and smiled at her wanely. "Now what?" 

And that's when the bad guys kicked the door to the barn in.


	2. Falling (please pick one— a: off buildings b: through doorways c: past memories)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rewind into the past and the beginning of how Bucky and Bobbi got themselves into the fine mess they are in.

Record scratch.

Rewind.

_Two days ago. A small boutique hotel, overlooking the water off Strada Lebedei in Constanta, Romania_

“Room service!” Ioana called brightly in English at the door to the Honeymoon Suite, on the very top floor of the Hotel Frumusete. A one bedroom with a full bath, most of the floor space was given over to a roof top terrace. The view of the sea and the buildings of the Old Town was breathtaking. 

Not that this particular couple seemed to be looking at much more than each other. The staff spent a fair amount of time speculating on the erotic goings on in the room—in the three days since they’d checked in neither the dark haired man or his new wife had left the building. They ordered room service a few times a day, mostly light meals with lots of vegetables. 

It would explain why the woman’s figure was so amazing. Ioana couldn’t have helped but notice it and sigh that such a lovely woman was wasting herself on a man. Though the staff so inclined seemed equally entranced by this particular brute’s looks.

It was the man who opened the door.

He was well built, she had to grant him that, with strong shoulders and long wild hair. His mouth in particular was lovely, full and sensual, almost as pretty as a woman's. He nodded at her and took the tray out of her hands, gently replacing it with a rather generous tip in cash. He did not smile but his face was not unkind. 

“Did you need anything else, sir? Madam?” Ioana craned her neck a little, to see past him. Up here it was still sunny, though the night was coming on. Out on the deck, visible through the living room, the blond woman sat on a lounge chair, long legs and shoulders bare to the world, crisp hair flowing around her. She looked over at them both and smiled, her eyes covered in yellow tinted sunglasses.

“ _We are smooth, thanking you,_ ” she said in slow, laborious Romanian.

The man did smile now and shook his head. “ _She’s trying_ ” he said in an apologetic voice, his own Romanian fluent and facile, though with the edge of an accent.

“We appreciate the courtesy, of course sir, madam. Have a lovely night!’ Ioana called. The door closed in her face and she sighed. Such a pretty lady and so polite. Why couldn’t she meet a nice girl like that, who wanted to learn her language? Whisk her off, out of the city, to Los Angeles, to London, away from here…

*****

“You are in _there_ , if you felt like experimenting” Bucky Barnes said as he stalked out onto the deck, laying the food tray down between there chairs and pulling out his Starkphone. He wasn’t done memorizing the street layout near their target. 

“Yeah, I thought about texting Clint if I could have a fling. I suspect he’d be okay if I got permission to send pictures,” Bobbi Barton said, her hand on her tac googles, currently disguised as sunglasses, though she let the camotech fade as soon as the door closed. She was scanning the warehouse area across the indentation in the harbor in front of their hotel, looking for discrepancies between the public plans and the actual construction. She reached over without looking, whipped off the cover of the tray and scooped up a slice of the fresh baked bread the hotel made, spread with Zacusca.

“This is addictive,” she muttered around her mouthful of bread and vegetable paste. “I want to make a spicy version now. Love me some eggplant.”

Bucky had already started in on the Plescoi sausages, his eyes happy. He grinned a little. “I thought, um what was it Nat told me—girls are icky?”

“Never going to let me forget that one, are they?” she returned sourly. “I was drunk and in a bad place. I concede I wasn’t thinking straight—don’t say it!” She pointed at him as he opened his mouth. “I heard it too and just don’t.”

“It’s not like you were thinking gay,” Bucky said in a very deliberate manner. 

Bobbi rolled her eyes. “I regret teaching you relics modern slang.”

“Huh, you’d regret it more if I used one of the words we used to back then,” he said, his eyes troubled.

She nodded and went back to her scanning . “You and Steve sure adjusted fast to stuff like that. I’d have thought there be more…lingering bigotry. Not that either of you would want to be that way it would just be there.”

“Steve was never like that. I never hear him use a slur, ever, for anyone.” Bucky looked away uncomfortably. "And I did but I stopped when...well, when I heard guys in the gym locker room calling Steve names. Little guy, mouthy, art student...he got called things. Fairy was the politest one. I hated it so much I could never do it anymore, after."

"Toxic masculinity through the ages," Bobbi said, not unkindly. "I've been pleasantly impressed about how little us girls have had to beat the two of you into shape. I was never worried about racism, much, after seeing Steve with Sam but the sexism of your birth era was just as engrained. Poor Peggy Carter."

"Huh, you never knew Peggy back then. She took no guff."

Bobbi stared at him a moment. "Didn't mean she didn't take wounds, Buck. It's like getting bitten to death by rats: one nibble won't kill you but it hurts and it festers and it gets infected and the next one makes it worse, and the next, and then you bleed to death."

He winced and nodded. "Yeah, I…I was the problem for some women, I know.” He ran a hand through his hair, pulling the end of the long strands. “I mean before—”

“Before Hydra showed you what it was like for us?” Bobbi asked absently, her fingers flying over her Starkphone, sketching in wireframe floor plans for the three warehouses they’d marked as the most likely to be their targets.

The frosty silence from Bucky’s chair eventually registered. Bobbi gave him a side eye, then put down her phone and took off her goggles, flicking the ‘record’ function to off and showing him she had.

“What,” he said through gritted teeth, “do you mean by that?”

“From how pissed you are, I think you know. And frankly, you can take that reaction and shove it up your perfect little butt.”

They glared at each other, the silence lengthening enough that the sunlight dropped away, leaving them both in shadows. Bucky turned his head a little, willing himself not to use his enhanced eye sight to see her expression. He could hear the servos in his bionic arm whining, shrill and metallic, which was usually a sign he was transmitting unclear messages to his nerves. 

“Sport, you’re a good guy. I like you. I like you for you and because of what you do for Steve and Nat. You’re a good teammate and a good training partner and a good cook. But you gotta stop avoiding what they did to you, mentally. You’re trying to, now that your memory gaps are getting smaller and it’s not helping.”

“I don’t know—”

“They imprisoned you. They tortured you. They used your body without consent. They mutilated you, brainwashed you, tried to steal Steve and the Commandos from you. They perverted the things that made you a hero: your skills, your courage, your stubborn will. They tried to turn you into a tool, a weapon—a pretty shiny toy they could break and repair and break again without consequences.” She leaned forward, a lithe shape against the glow of the city lights on the street five floors down. _”And then they ordered you to like it.”_ Her voice, low and rich, sliced at him like a knife. “That’s the experience of being a woman in the world Buck. It was Peggy’s life, and Nat’s. Mine and Sharon’s. Hill and Pepper and almost every woman you meet. Swallow the abuse and smile; bear up under pressures that would break most people or fear being called weak. Watch your accomplishments and needs and desires be ignored or swept away in favor of the unworthy around you. Suffer, and be told you should like it.”

She tossed her head, picking up her goggles and spinning them by the strap around one finger. “You wonder why defend what we have so fiercely? Because we’d rather die than lose it. Same as you.” She stopped fidgeting with the goggles and reached out a hand as though to touch his knee, then stopped. Her palm hovered over his jeans but did not land. “On that note, Bucky Barnes, you better stop skinning out of your therapy sessions or it’s intervention time.” She went back to what she had been doing, goggles on, phone in hand.

He sat very still for a long time, long enough to feel the air temperature dip a degree. 

“Intervention?” He asked suddenly, grasping at the thing he could process in what she had said. He wanted to argue about it, instinctively knew he couldn’t until the surge of bitter revulsion passed and took the tangent she offered him. 

“Yeah, that’s when we take you down to the training gym, lock the door and everyone stands around telling you they are very concerned and makes you talk about your feelings.”

He laughed. He couldn’t help it. “As if any of you could make me do anything I didn’t wan—”

“God of Thunder, sport. Just because Thor doesn’t body check you through a wall when you spar doesn’t mean he can’t. It just means he knows the medical staff will be pissed off if he breaks another of the puny humans. He’s already volunteered to hold you down if need be.”

That stopped Bucky dead, because that very thought had occurred to him the last time he and Steve had fought the Asgardian. The coiled power in his body was palpable even in repose. In combat, it was a current of electricity just under his skin, a force of nature. Even together, the Super Soldiers could not depend on beating Thor in a fight.

“That’s not fair, that you’d single me out,” Bucky pointed out, slowly picking up his street maps again. 

“What’s the only category in the automated grocery menu at the Tower that isn’t same hour delivery?” Bobbi countered, nonsensically. 

“Alcohol,” Bucky said. He’d always assumed the twenty four hour delay was some arcane liquor law. 

“Pepper or Bruce have to approve all those orders so that Tony doesn’t drink himself to death,” she said, not looking at him. “Sam and I don’t have the fancy palm locks on our guns just to stop bad guys from taking them—Steve and Clint can remotely freeze the triggers if they need to; I also have a currently controlled eating disorder. Natasha’s not allowed to wear bulky shoes or padded socks around the Tower, so she can’t hide the state of her feet. Clint spends more than three hours at the range, Nat or I know about it right away. Bruce’s never out of surveillance by Jarvis; he can’t get more than a few blocks away without an alert going off.”

Bucky mulled over her words, hearing the unspoken traumas behind them: PTSD, self-harm, suicidal ideations. “What’s Steve’s check and balance?” He asked.

“Doesn't have one yet,” Bobbi murmured. “Unfair benefit of being team leader, he can order us to leave him alone. Mostly we do, thought I’ve broken ranks once or twice and so have Sam and Nat. The reason we have interventions in the first place, complete with the Asgardian dog and pony show, is because sometimes even Steve needs to be sat down and told he’s being an idiot.” She paused, her breath sighing out gently. “I was kind of hoping you’d know something that would work with him. I mean when you were feeling better.”

“Take away his sketch pad,” Bucky said immediately.

“I said ‘something’ not ‘something that would make him homicidal’,” she snapped in an appalled tone.

Bucky snorted. “Well, what about Thor?”

“Thor is fifteen hundred years old, he’s beyond our petty human concerns.” Bobbi stopped and Bucky could nearly hear her brain ticking over. “Mostly we just threaten to tell his mom he’s being a jerk and he straightens right out.” 

And that made him laugh aloud, banishing the sick bitter bile that washed over his tongue. He stopped on an odd thought. “Hold on, is this conversation why it’s you and I and not Nat and I on this mission?”

“It’s one why, yeah. Nat refused to have the convo with you—in her eyes you’re perfect the way you are,” she said, not looking at him.

He was glad, it let him wipe his burning eyes discretely. 

“That being said, Nat likes grim, taciturn emo boys so it’s not really a compliment,” Bobbi said dryly. “But it was a kill five birds with one stone thing.”

She held up her off hand, tapping notes into the phone with her right. 

“One: this conversation; it was going to be me or Sam and this mission came up before we could fight it out back at the Tower. Two: a test of our working relationship; I am Nat’s back up for these missions when she’s not mine. Three: some of us were getting concerned that Steve and Nat were smothering you a bit. Four: You are a full member and deserve the right to exercise your skills; that’s why you’re team lead here right now. Five: We try not to send Nat into Eastern Europe much these days. There have been a few unpleasantly close calls from people who had personal agendas that over rode tactical concerns.”

Bucky winced. “The Black Widow was not…much loved…in these countries. But then neither was I.”

“That’s the benefit of the ‘remember you’re a wild animal and we have you on our leash’ fetish gear Hydra cooked up for the Winter Soldier. Not a hell of a lot of living people know your face.”

 _But so many dead people could cry my name, my true name that you just spoke_ he thought. The youth of the Black Widow trials, frozen bones under the Siberian dirt. His ‘missions’ across the world, men and women and children ( _they learned fast to never send him after children anymore, not when twice he broke his conditioning and ran afterwards_ ). Nearly Natasha in Odessa. Nearly Steve in Washington. Nearly Bobbi herself in New York.

He shuddered, the weight of the dead bearing down on him, their thin voices whispering hate and fear into his ears. He started to hunch forward when Bobbi exclaimed.

“Fuck me, the entire greek chorus just showed up down there, sport. It might be worth a close recon if you feel up to it,” she said, flipping her phone around so he could see its face. It was nearly full dark so the screen glowed clearly.

He took a deep breath and focussed on the wireframe readout of their target warehouse and the street outside. Cars were arriving and disgorging small groups of people, looking for all the world like a red carpet line up at a movie premiere. Their weapons deal might be going down tonight. The memories and emotions flooding him snapped off, leaving behind the Soldier.

“Yeah, get your batons and armor, we’ll go down and see what we can see,” he ordered. 

They both got up and gathered the tools of their trade: her guns, her batons with their concealed monomolecular diamond edge blades, her jacket with the concealed holsters. His own handguns and knives, including the old straight blade with the chipped handle that had Russian army insignia on it. 

They both skinned into the latest iteration of super Kevlar body armor; the stuff Stark made for the team these days was so slimline the women could wear it under party dresses. In a few minutes they were ready, Bobbi slotting her batons into the sleeve holsters of her jacket, Bucky pulling the edge of his red Henley down over his back holster. 

She opened her hands to him when he was done and he looked her over, his enhanced eyesight making the once over quite thorough. 

Bucky nodded.

They both took two running steps and jumped off the building.

They’d picked this hotel for its placement, proximity, layout of the top floor and the building next to it. A commercial building, with no windows facing into the small cramped dead end alley that separated it from the hotel. 

A perfect spot to not be seen jumping into open air like it’s nothing. 

Bucky just let himself fall the five stories to the ground, cushioning his landing by bending his body till his bionic arm touched the ground. Bobbi took a few seconds longer, rebounding off one wall then the other like a pinball, landing next to him in silence. 

When they emerged onto the street they were the picture of a couple out for a stroll, Bobbi hanging off his left arm (which helped conceal the slightly unnatural movement of the metal limb), resting her head on his shoulder. Her tactical googles now looked like just a pair of glasses.

“You’ve got a serious ‘sexy librarian’ vibe going, Barton,” Bucky muttered.

“Sexy biochemist sub-division. Fewer movie moments but more Nobel Prizes,” she retorted. That made him laugh.

She actually made him laugh a lot. So did Clint. They were both goofy, unselfconscious clowns, sharing a willingness to make themselves look silly if it brought their friends some happiness.

It made the moments they stripped their masks back, revealing the bedrock of the cool sniper and the scientific warrior a lot more shocking than he’d expected. That was, he felt, rather the point. 

They made their way with deceptive speed towards the block of industrial warehouses on the waterfront. Once they were out of the publicly trafficked areas they dropped the pretense of being a couple in favor of ghosting from shadow to shadow, doorway to doorway, one following, one leading, both watching the other’s back. 

Outside the target warehouse they stopped together in the black lee of the building, concealed and silent. Bobbi tapped a faint projection of the interior onto the wall. The best door to get them into the crowded back storage area of the space was around the corner, facing the street. A few lone street lights made anemic pools of orange light against the ground but the door they needed was shrouded in shadow. Bucky slid forward and touched the handle, planning to simply twist the locking mechanism out of alignment when his senses registered…

…something…someone…

…had just shot at him.

A silenced rifle shot, from the roof across the street, aimed for his back. He heard the release of the bullet, the hiss of the cloven air.

Bucky spun and the bullet that would have lodged in his spine hit him in the chest, over his heart. He staggered back, into the doorway.

Bobbi was…magnificent. 

Without pausing or wasting time in panic she just jammed her shoulder into his right side and used him as a battering ram to force the door open. Even as the metal and wood frame of the door collapsed under his back, he appreciated her brutal efficiency. He would have done the same.

They fell together into a filthy dark corridor, light burning brightly to their left. The sound of voices rose and fell, moving. Moving closer. 

Well, their little entrance was fairly dramatic.


	3. Last Guests At The Inn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back to the present, Bucky and Bobbi need a place to sleep

The first guy through the door took a thrown baton to the face, went down and never got back up again. Bobbi caught it on the third rebound, fixed her weapons into their staff configuration and began painfully levering herself to her feet. 

In the time it took for the first guy to die, Bucky shoulder rolled across the space to the door, grabbed the second guy by the leg and heaved. He went up and down onto his back, falling as the Winter Soldier rose, like a see saw. The third guy got off one shot, blocked by Bucky's metal hand, then took a punch from that same hand that snapped his head back at an unnatural angle. Almost as an afterthought, Bucky kicked the downed man in the head. There was a _crunch_. 

"Well, that worked a treat, just like you planned," the Winter Soldier nodded at Mockingbird. "Talk about two birds with one stone: bullet out of my chest _and_ we have supplies now." 

"Five moves, three seconds. I do so love working with professionals," Bobbi said casually as she limped over to the bodies, carefully knelt and began searching the first man's pockets. Bucky did the same with the other two and they heaped their bounty on the floor between them: weapons, ammo and money. No ID so they still weren’t sure who was after them. 

Five knives, of which Bobbi took three. Four guns, three of which went to the Winter Soldier after a brief tussle over the Luger. 

"Selfish jerk," Bobbi said as she checked the action on the Walther he left her with. "That's like the third time you've taken candy right out of my hands." 

"I like Lugers," he said, rifling through the wad of Romanian _leu_ , counting it. "It's sentimental. First gun I ever took off a Nazi was a Luger." 

"No shit, I woulda been surprised if it hadn't been. Still not fair." 

"So buy yourself one." 

"If we're being honest the SIG is better for my grip and shooting style. I just think Luger's are cool looking," she looked up at him with a grin, checking the seams on one man's trousers and then moving to pull off his boots. 

Bucky looked at her a minute, then chuckled, shaking his head. _"Heavens preserve me from this plague of terrifying women,"_ he murmured in Russian. 

"It's two. Nat and I. Two is not a plague," Bobbi returned in mock affront. 

"The two of you are legion, you contain multitudes," he retorted. 

"You're crazy or you're boring," she said, nodding. 

He cocked his head. "Does that mean Steve is boring?" 

"Steve is as nuts as the rest of us. If he was sane he'd have an endorsement contract, a movie career and a mansion with half-naked swimsuit models hanging off his abs. All you overly ripped and attractive dudes would. Instead, you hang out with a bunch of heavily armed clowns in spandex outfits, running around beating people up. We're all crazy here, some of us just have more excuses than others. Odin, at least Banner, Stark and I can fall back on the 'geniuses are all unstable' trope." 

Bucky pursed his lips then nodded agreement. 

***** 

They stole the bad guys’ car, an ancient grey sedan, but not their phones. No way to turn the GPS off. 

Bobbi couldn't drive with her ankle, so she lounged back in the passenger seat, staring out the window at the endless farmland around them. They'd decided to risk the run to Bucharest--even if they team didn't go there (and they would)--there was a division of StarkSoft quartered downtown. No matter how shitty they looked, crossing the threshold at any Stark Industries building would get Jarvis' attention. It was getting dark though and they weren't rushing. If they got pulled over, looking the way they did, with multiple weapons and no ID they'd be arrested. Sitting ducks in cells somewhere. 

"I feel bad about stealing from that pharmacy," Bobbi said eventually. They were on the 3 motorway, the south route to the capital, lengthier but possibly less obvious than the main E81. She pulled the pill bottle with the bullet out of her pocket, letting it rattle a moment, then tucked it back. 

"I know. We'll go back and give them some money once people are aren't trying to kill us," Bucky said. 

"About that--" Bobbi said, then stopped. 

"What?" 

"They had a clean headshot." Bobbi spoke in a flat voice. "Back in the warehouse. On both of us. And you get shot in the torso. Red Henley or not, no pro shoots an Avenger in the center of mass and expects to kill them; our body armor is legendary in the trade by now. They wanted that bullet leeching shit into your bloodstream. Weak and sick." 

"Are you really sure it's coated?" 

"It's not just coated, it's made out of something seriously messed up and it _might_ have actually had a small payload in the tip, since it looks burst open. No proper sniper round deforms like that--and it's shaped wrong. No jacket, not hollow point. It looks hand made. If you wanted me to guess I'd lay money on a combo of borderline radioactive heavy metals and nerve poisons; curare works on Steve in a high enough concentration." She sighed and brought her injured leg up, hugging it against her chest. "It might even be my fault. Hydra-Shield sold my research to the highest bidder back when and I did a serious amount of work on you guys and your metabolisms. Well, Steve but it's all applicable to you." 

As she spoke she pulled out a small ampule of a clear liquid and a clean syringe, filled it and injected it into her ankle. “Last of the stuff I salvaged out of my coat. I’ll know if this is working by tomorrow. I don’t think the ankle’s broken but if it is all the Accelecortical on the planet isn’t going to help it.” She patted her own foot. “Please be a sprain, there’s a good little joint.”

Bucky laughed at her, relaxing a little. “So, someone wanted me incapacitated but alive. And they didn't shoot you because it would kill you. Great." 

They made similar noises of disgusted frustration. 

"I know, right?" Bobbi said. "So much easier to deal with when they're just trying for a simple assassination." 

“I hate being a prisoner,” he muttered. 

“Me too.”

Bucky swallowed hard. “Hey, I need food, we both need sleep. Wanna risk a hotel or guest house or something?”

“Yeah, though probably still shouldn’t call in. I mean, three dead thugs sorta prove they have a trap and trace on the local phone lines.”

“I miss my phone. I’ve barely had one for my whole life, Stark hands me the damn thing like it’s nothing and now I can’t live without it. I miss being able to talk to Nat whenever I want—” He stopped abruptly, swallowing.

They drove in silence for a long while, towards a large-ish cluster of lights growing brighter as the night fell. Before they made the outskirts of the town, Bobbi touched Bucky’s arm.

“Pull over, will you? Just anywhere. We need to talk out a few things.”

When he found a small gravel turn out and the engine was off, Bobbi pinched his upper arm through the cheap coarse fabric of his stolen shirt. 

“Ow! What’s that for?” He yelped, glaring at her. Their faces were both almost in total shadow now, but the occasional passing car would give them each a strobing look at each other’s expressions. 

“You are real. So am I. Nat is real and you will speak to her again soon. Steve is real and would fight the world to protect you. The team is real and you’re part of it. You are awake,” she said, apropos of nothing, it seemed. But some deeply held tension went out of this shoulders and his diaphragm relaxed. He breathed deep, smelling and tasting her blood and his, her sweat and his, dirt, oil, the particular tang of a loaded gun. From conversations he’d had with Steve, he knew his version of the super soldier serum had affected his senses a little differently. He seemed to have a better sense of smell and taste; Steve got better hearing and touch. They both had hyper keen eyesight. He used his now to fold back a little of the darkness in the car, to study her. 

She was not really beautiful. Her face was long, with a pointed chin and deep cheekbones. She had an even nose and a wide warm mouth. He couldn’t really see her eyes but he could paste them in from memory: big, blue-grey, intelligent now he was sure, when she was making no effort to hide herself. 

She was not beautiful, the way Natasha was beautiful, the way Sharon was beautiful. She was strong and regal and wildly sensual, hedonistic. 

She was not beautiful.

She didn’t need to be. She was herself, Bobbi Barton, Mockingbird. She was the most _herself_ person he’d ever met; mercurial and fierce but centred. She knew who she was, good and bad accepted in the same breath. The more he got to know her the more he understood why Nat and Steve loved her so much. She was a mirror that reflected the best of themselves back at them, because she needed to take nothing from either of them. She was just happy to hold their reflections. 

He had begun to wonder, not long after they got back from space, if she could do that for him too. 

Though every time he thought it, he saw Clint’s face in the alien slave market as he tried to give his life for hers. 

Now he saw something he didn’t quite understand in the line of her mouth, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. 

‘I did that because you were spiralling and it’s not good for you. You get lost, inside that broken head of yours. I imagine your mental scars are like the Minotaur’s labyrinth in there, pulling you deeper and deeper down into the cold.”

Ah. It was empathy. Not sympathy as he’d feared.

“Who’s at the center?” She asked gently. “Down in the darkness at the end of the spool of thread, who do you find? It’s not the Winter Soldier anymore; he’s walking the path beside you, one hand on your shoulder now. Who’s the monster of your maze, Buck?”

“I don’t know,” he lied.

She blinked and nodded, not accepting his words but acknowledging his right to conceal himself. “You are talking to the queen of PTSD on this cruise ship, by the way. I’m the one person you never have excuse yourself to.”

“That’s Nat,” he said, in reflexive defence of _milli moy_. 

“Bullshit. You’re not a hundred percent honest with each other any more than Clint and I are. That’s why I have Steve and Clint has her and she has me and you have, fuck I don’t know, do you talk to yourself? Cause you’re not talking to Sam or I and it’s our job you know.”

“I don’t _want_ to talk about it,” he muttered.

“And I don’t want to shave my legs but if I give Clint vicious rug burn I’ll pay for it in the gym,” she retorted. 

That surprised a laugh out of him. He started the car again and pulled out on the dark motorway. “Point taken but right now isn’t the time.”

“Find the time soon, Barnes, or I warned you.”

“Intervention.”

“Yeah, with a snack table and a ring of chairs and nothing else on the agenda for the night.”

They passed a big ‘attraction next right’ type road sign with two titles written on it: Tropaeum Traiani and something that looked like the name of a church. The next sign proclaimed they were approaching the town of Adamclisi just after the turn off. Bucky abruptly took the right turn.

“And what are we doing now? It’s a bit dark for sight seeing,” Bobbi said in a mild voice.

“You don’t read Romanian that well, do you?”

She sighed. “No, it’s one of the ones I struggle with. I can understand it spoken better but I think that’s getting things from context.”

“There’s an Eastern Orthodox monastery up the hill here. They’ll give us shelter for free and not ask questions. I think we got robbed in Constanta and the police were no help. I’ll imply the officer was upset I married an American and that we had no money for a bribe. We’re driving to Bucharest, we have family there. We just need a bed and some peace and quiet.” He squinted at her at the pulled closer to a large complex of stone buildings, fronted by a big church with glowing candles in the windows and surrounded by lovingly manicured gardens, partially visible even in the dark. “Act helpless and hysterical, will you?”

Their little playlet went off without a hitch. Someone had apparently seen them coming for a brace of bearded men in black robes approached the car as soon as Bucky slewed it to a halt in front of the church. He popped out and began babbling at them in fluid Romanian, gesturing wildly. 

Bobbi couldn’t really hear what they were saying but from the monk’s body language they were skeptical of Bucky. So she opened her door and painfully hauled herself out of the car, crying out to him in English. “Are they not going to help? Oh, James, please I just need some rest!” 

She wailed and crumpled to a heap in the dirt next to the car, weeping. Bucky skittered over to her, pulling her into his arms and hugging her tightly. Behind him the monks exchanged quick words and the younger one turned and walked quickly back towards a building beyond the church. The older man, his long beard streaked with grey, moved to the couple with great dignity. 

“This is your wife sir?” He asked, his voice deep and smooth.

From the shelter of Bucky’s arms Bobbi looked up, as though recognizing the word ‘wife”. 

“Yes, yes!” She sobbed in Romanian, her accent thick and stilted. “Just married, just married. My ring! My ring is stolen!” She wailed again and buried her head in Bucky’s chest.

“They took everything and I think…I think maybe the police don’t care. I bring my new wife home, to show her our beautiful country and these monsters hurt her!” Bucky choked out, sounding sick and angry. “Please, father, just let us sleep in an outbuilding, in a barn. Just somewhere safe for the night, we will leave at dawn, I swear.”

The man’s eyes, in the uncertain light, were kind despite his stern countenance. “We would not leave you in such a state my son. We have some small rooms we use for visitors, plain and simple, but with a bed and some warmth. We can give you fresh clothing and perhaps a bath between you. You and your lady wife will be safe tonight.”

“Oh, praise god,” Bobbi gasped in English. “Praise the lord.”

That seemed to be the final straw in convincing the man they were authentic. A group of men in robes were descending on them by now, carrying lanterns and bundles of cloth.

“Praise him indeed,” Bucky said, rocking her gently in his arms.

That was how the Winter Soldier and the Mockingbird came to spend the rest of the night sleeping in the same narrow cot, in rough homespun garments and thick peasant socks, in a little room made of stone and freezing air. 

At least the bathwater hadn’t been quite as cold.


	4. Aerobics Class with Bucky and Bobbi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happened at the warehouse

_Two days ago, the Constanta Docks_

Bobbi dragged Bucky away from the smashed open door, expecting another shot, a volley of shots. They were both exposed and if the sniper was across the street all they needed to do was lay a grenade in the opening and that would be it. 

But nothing came, no dirt or cement kicked up from bullet impacts, no more bleeding wounds on either of their bodies. Just her gasping breath, the murky shadows of the cluttered narrow aisles, the sound of angry voices and the deeper red soaking through the crimson fabric of Bucky's Henley. He was making confused, agonized noises and shaking in her arms. He wasn't getting up, every time he tried his knees would go out. She'd watched him get stitched from hip to shoulder with a TEC-9 in a Bronx back alley and he'd laid out five gang members before he'd even said "ow". One shot, not a through and through, and he was suddenly flailing like a new born foal. She got them both well out of the line of any fire, behind a wall of boxes on heavy metal shelves and let her gaze refocus to her HUD. Readings were scrolling by, repeating themselves and this time she saw the energy flare from the bullet as it struck, even a hint of possible composition and where it had stopped. It looked to be embedded in his sternum, partially nicking a rib. And it practically glowed on her HUD, lighting up every register from radioactive to heavy metal toxicity and-- 

A small round device rolled under the shelves to bump Bucky's foot. Despite whatever the bullet was doing to him, Bucky moved as fast as Steve would have, snatching Bobbi into his arms and turning to pin her under his body. Protecting her from any explosive blast. 

The device went off with a high pitched shriek-- 

\--no that was the sound of both of them screaming in pain as the high intensity EMP that had just detonated shorted out their in-ear communication devices, both their phones, Bobbi's goggles and Bucky's left arm. 

Bobbi shoved Bucky off her and he fell limp to one side, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly. She clawed her earpiece out and dragged her goggles off to hang on her chest, blinking and gasping. 

When she looked up, it was into the barrels of a lot of guns. 

"Holy shit, he was telling the truth," a voice hissed in English from the darkness behind the hench people drawing down on them. "Two Avengers. This just turned into a party." 

"Not dressed for a party sport," Bobbi slurred, struggling to stand. "Tell you what, I'll go get my dancing shoes and a nice red dress. You all wait here for us to get back." 

Someone from her left side slapped her on the side of the head, hard, knocking her down and onto Bucky. He tried to get up himself but he kept trying to shove himself up with his left arm and it hung uselessly at his side. Rough hands grabbed and hauled them apart -- Bobbi had her arms forced up and pinned to the back of her head by four people. Bucky had six on him, his right arm twisted brutally up between his shoulder blades. He was groggy and vague-eyed, and getting weaker with every beat of his heart. After a desperately cursory search that found only the really obvious weapons they were frog-marched, both stumbling, down a confusing maze of dusty aisles and through a set of swinging doors, then into a huge warehouse lined and stacked with bigger boxes. In a large open space at the center of the area, a large crowd of people stood, staring. They were visibly separated into multiple groups by wedges of empty floor. Some groups were in distinctive uniforms. 

"All right, which one of you assholes is hiding the Arc of the Covenant in here?" Bobbi called. "Is it you Foreson? It's you, isn't it?" That was directed at the most striking group, all in yellow containment suits, looking all the world like heavily armed bee keepers. 

"My god do you ever get _less_ annoying Morse?" One of them returned in an irritated voice, sweeping his cape aside. 

"Are you still a mansplaining asswipe?" she shot back. "And it's Barton, try to keep up." 

"Hmmph," said a regal ice blond woman in a sleek pale business suit, her voice thick with an Eastern European accent. "Is I suppose confirmation, and from her own mouth. The Mockingbird. Certain we are the man is who he's said to be?" 

A tall man with slicked back dark hair and a pointed beard moved into the light. "The Maggia have surveillance of him with Captain America, who certainly believes that he is Sgt Barnes--of course, he's also supposed to be quite dead, so..." 

"He looks lively enough to me," whispered another person, their voice a quavering mystery from inside a deep hood. "Plenty of fun to be had with both of them before we hand him off. We should auction the woman before she gets too badly damaged I suppose." 

"Let's get physical," Bobbi responded. 

Then she released the catches on her batons, hidden inside her sleeves. They shot out from under her wrists to strike one of the men holding her and one of the women holding Barnes, both in the head. They went down like they’d had their spines severed.

Bucky was weakened by whatever was in his chest, that was true. But the Winter Soldier was very good at appearing to be something other than what he truly was. He took the opening Mockingbird had given him, the lessened pressure on his left and heaved in that direction, simply ignoring the pain from his twisted arm.

Beside him, Bobbi dropped her weight like a dead thing, falling backwards to hit the cement hard with first her gluteus and then her back. The people holding her had expected resistance, expected her to surge forward, not drop back. One of them got their leg into a bad place and Bobbi’s body hit it on the way down. She felt their knee bend unnaturally to one side, and then they were gone, out of her personal space. 

Three down. Seven to go. 

Bobbi bucked her hips as they touched the cement, slapped her right hand down and pivoted on that point like a break dancer, her scything legs taking out two more, one of hers, one of Bucky’s. As she swept back down her left hand found one of her batons, then the other one and she straightened back up with that one held like a sword in her right hand, the switch so fast it was invisible. She _flèched_ from standing, explosive power from the heaviest muscle group of her body, her legs. She was off the ground before her back foot could even cross over. When she hit the fourth person who had been holding her, she was horizontal to the floor. They flew away from her like they’d been launched by a cannon, directly into the nearest group of enemies, bowling them over en masse.

She rolled up on her landing to see Bucky — with not an ounce of his usual cool precision — just brutally hurling people away from him using pure unfocused Super Soldier rage. As he came clear he darted forward, grabbed her around the waist like she was Fay Wray and he was King Kong and parkoured his way up the side of the nearest boxes carrying her. 

They were gone before anyone in the main group had even had a chance to move. On top of the stack, he let her go and they both just sprinted head long down the slippery, teetering, filthy shipping container tops. They came to the far wall of the warehouse and jumped down. Bucky fell as he hit the floor, gasping in pain.

“Sorry, I can’t, I don’t know—” he choked out, staggering upright again.

“Bullet lodged in your chest is toxic, it’s fucking you up, we have to get it out but first we have to get out of here,” Bobbi snapped, checking both aisles. No pursuit yet. 

She sat down on the floor for a second, looking up at him. “Bucky there are like nine factions of people who specifically hate us in that meeting. There were three splinter factions of A.I.M.! “

“The white blond is Symkarian, the leader of their crypto-fascist party. I think I killed her father or something. Maybe. Silver Sable, I remember her being around too, she might have actually killed the guy. Two of them were American, I think?” He asked, kneeling next to her a moment. 

“Yeah, beard guy is Count Nefaria, he’s mobbed up and the hoodie is I _think_ Parker Robbins who’s on Doctor Strange’s radar.” She took a deep breath. “You’re still conscious and rational. It’s still your decision.”

He stood up, moved to lean against the cool cement wall and looked at her. “Think we can take them, even with me weak?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “But it’ll be a blood bath—we’d have to kill everyone who looked at us funny.”

He stared into the middle distance, his long hair half falling across his face. He looked like a lost little boy when that happened, sweet and soulful. 

Bobbi felt a sudden urge to kiss him, to see how his full mouth felt different than Clint’s. See if he tasted as good as he smelled. 

“No,” he came out with suddenly. “I’m not going back to that being my first choice. If we have to, we have to but we don’t start with death. Avengers don’t start with death.”

She rose to face him, only a little shorter than him. “Agreed,” she said gratefully. “And if we did that we might not find out who really set this up.”

From the end of the aisle a voice shouted: “Surrender now, Avengers, and we won’t hurt you!’

Bobbi rolled her eyes and leaned out into open air a moment. “To paraphrase Doctor Who, look around you and think about the number of times we have handed you all your asses. Look around and then decide: who’s going to go first?” 

There came the sound of furious whispering echoing through the air, which then receded.

Bucky nodded. “That’ll buy us a few minutes.” He studied her a moment. “I figured you catch that—whomever shot me was not one of these guys. They were half as a surprised as we were but they were expecting something. Someone brought them together and promised them Avengers to torment.”

“Nat was right then, about a mole. Bucky, I think…they wanted you. I’m collateral damage, a bonus to sweeten the pot. With that many trails leading away from here if everything had gone to plan the team would be chasing us—me—across the globe. Someone wanted a chance to spirit you away in the chaos.”

He squinted at her. “So you’re saying this is all my fault?”

“For once, yes.”

They grinned at each other and he tried to push away from the wall, forgetting his left arm still wasn’t working. Then he staggered and almost fell. “We gotta fly before whatever this damn bullet is messes me up completely.”

“I say we go up, to the roof.”

“The sniper is somewhere up there.”

“Yeah. I know. I think they aren’t from this little house party. I think they just wanted to make sure we knocked on the right door and you were not your usual self in the process. I wouldn’t mind having a chat with them.”

Bobbi had been scanning the walls as she spoke, finally spotting what she’d been looking for — a sturdy I-beam with a bracket attachment to the wall next to a high window. An outside wall so they weren’t going to be in the sniper’s line of sight. She fiddled with her batons, sticking them together, then pointing them upwards. With a soft hydraulic _puff_ one of them shot up, dragging a cable from the interior of the other, and wrapped around the support. Bobbi gestured at Bucky. 

“Come here and grab me roughly from behind,” she said with a cheeky grin. He shook his head at her but walked over and wrapped his working arm around her waist. She took a firm grip on the baton. “On three…two…one.”

As she activated the spooler inside her weapon Bucky bent his knees and leapt, sending them both flying upwards. The slender chord was braided nano-steel and could support the Hulk; the small internal motor was entirely mechanical but powerful enough to lift three people for a short distance. Bucky weighed more than two men but using the assist from his legs negated the extra weight. In seconds they were both clutching the I-beam and Bobbi was carefully cutting half the glass of the long thin window away with her diamond edge blades. 

By the time Foreson and Robbins had alternately chivied, shamed and threatened their personal thugs into advancing down the aisles, Bobbi and Bucky were out of the window and halfway to the roof.

Disgustingly, even one armed Bucky climbed like a mountain goat. 

Bobbi still made it to the roof first, eeling over the edge onto the tar paper and gravel. As Bucky crested the edge, he saw her crouched in the lee of an air-conditioning unit, her hand out in a “quiet” gesture. He moved silently but swiftly to her side. She had her useless phone in her hand, using the glass front as a mirror. Just visible, across the roof, two figures were pouring liquid from jerry cans onto roof. One had the barrel of a long arm sticking up over its shoulder.

The weirdly appealing scent of gasoline reached them on the night breeze.

“What’s a little arson between frenemies?” Bobbi muttered.

“A great way to muddy the water,” Bucky said. “For us.”

Bobbi looked at him in confusion then slowly smiled. “Oh you rat bastard genius you.”

He opened his working hand to her. “After you.”

Even without her camotech, Bobbi had a knack for not being seen when she didn’t want to be. She made it almost the entire way across the roof before one of the two men spreading the accelerant saw the shape blurring towards them. He opened his mouth to yell.

Bucky rose to his feet and threw Bobbi’s baton like a rifle bullet, striking him in the gut. He doubled over soundlessly and Bobbi was in the air, a flying knee to the chest hammering the other man—the sniper—to the roof top. 

She came down between the two of them as the man Bucky had downed was struggling to his knees. She kicked him in the head—

—he caught her foot. 

Avengers training and nearly a decade of fighting men super humanly stronger and faster than her made Bobbi react first and think later. Her baton snapped out to its full length and she broke his arm with the butt end, a single downward strike that turned into a punch to his face the instant she felt the resistance of the humerus bone give way. His jaw crumpled like paper, sending him sprawling. But he tried to get up again right away.

Bucky was there in the next instant, dropping to one knee to attack the sniper with his working arm, precise powerful blows despite being a little off balance. The man was fending him off, his head jerking from side to side to avoid the punches and his legs kicking.

“What are these guys, fucking zombies?” Bobbi hissed, spinning in place to crack the man she had already downed twice in the head with her baton. This time he stayed down.

“We are the true sons of the Motherland,” the one Bucky was fighting snarled. In Russian. The Winter Soldier stopped punching, his throat working to ask the man something—

—but before he could the man bit something at the back of his mouth and almond scented foam cascaded from his lips. Bucky jumped back, snarling, and turned to the other man.

He was face down and when the turned him over, the same foam covered his lower jaw.

Panting, the Avengers stared at each other. 

“Do you know them?” Bobbi asked. 

“I…no. But that’s not saying much with my swiss cheese brain.” He shook his head. Dosen’t matter. We need to get off this roof and—”

There was a hissing noise and the sound of shattering glass and an inferno rose around them. Bobbi dropped flat in the clear space at the edge of the accelerant, Bucky joining her a second later. 

“One of them still out there. Maybe more. Have to assume they’re going to come hunting us,” she snarled into his ear. “Them and everyone down there in the warehouse.”

“Not if they think we’re already dead,” he returned, then suddenly grabbed the leg of the furthest corpse and heaved it over to the other one. “Take off your jacket, throw it onto the little guy.”

“This thing is custom!” Bobbi wailed, under her breath, even as she was doing what he asked. She managed to rip out the lining and retrieve some of her stashed items, sticking them in her pants pockets and even tucking a couple into her cleavage. When she looked up Bucky had stripped off his red Henley and draped it on the larger man, leaving him in his sleeveless tactical vest. Bobbi grabbed his arm. “Turn the bionics toward me,” she hissed, extending the sword blade of one of her batons. When he did she pried two of the articulated metal plates off his upper arm and tossed them onto the corpse. She stashed her batons in her leg holsters.

The roof of the building started to creak ominously, then shifted and caved in at the epicentre of the flames. 

Bucky looked at Bobbi. “Water’s deep enough here, right?”

“Yes.” 

“Then go, now.”

They both popped to their feet and sprinted to the water side of the warehouse, barely steps ahead of the now rapidly failing roof. There were screams from the street outside and below them and sirens in the distance. 

For the second time that night, Mockingbird and the Winter Soldier jumped off a building together. 

*****

 

_Interlude — Present_

Stark Industries, Bucharest HQ

Steve Rogers paced back and forth on the deck, looking east, towards Constanta. Somewhere out there is best friend and his sister in all but blood were on the run, probably injured, maybe prisoners. It killed him to be unable to DO anything. The sliding glass door to the private luxury apartment that took up the roof of the building opened and shut. The sound of soft conversation wafted over him, then cut off. Steve caught the scent of metal and expensive grooming products, then whiskey.

“Tony,” he said by way of greeting.

“Hey man. You know we can hear you in there? You sound like a damn metronome, perfect rhythm,” Stark swirled the ice in his glass, then joined the super soldier at the edge of the deck. “Those two are, like, the most ruthless badasses I know. If things were really hairy we’d already have a trail of bodies to follow, not just the two from the warehouse.”

“That’s supposed to be comforting?” Steve said sourly.

“Well, yeah,” Stark responded. 

Before they could do what they always did when they were worried—bicker like an old married couple—there was a whirring sound from above and a Stark branded drone dropped into view, holding something in a pincer under its body. 

Tony put his glass down and held out his arms. The drone dropped the package into his grip and then swooped down to hover in front of them, for all the world like a faithful dog. Steve reached out and gently patted it on the sensor nodule, while craning his head to see what it had delivered.

“Damn it, that woman is one crafty—look at this,” Tony exclaimed, then held up the oddly shaped bulky bundle. It was two Starkphones, one with blue and white markings and the other a sleek matte black. They were held together by the knotted strap of Mockingbird’s tactical goggles. They were still damp and reeked of filthy seawater. 

Scratched into the surface of Mockingbird’s phone was a single word: “Analogue”.

“What does that mean?” Steve asked, still idly petting the drone, which was bumping his hand once in a while. 

“The whole EMP thing is getting annoying so I installed analogue backups on our phones and her googles. Really limited storage obviously, pretty much just about fifteen seconds of data but you’d be amazed how much that can mean.” Stark began humming under his breath, happily. “Let’s see what the lady left us, shall we?”


	5. Old friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky and Bobbi are finally confronted by the people who’ve been chasing them

Bobbi Barton had woken up in quite a few places over the years. 

Some really horrible ones: cramped filthy cells in space; a horror-filled cabin on a mattress stained with her own blood. Facedown in a jungle, only the pain of a shoulder wound pulling her out of the black in time not to aspirate mud and rotting vegetation. In a clean quiet room, next to a man who had betrayed her and she had to pretend to love. Under rough ledge of rock in the Canadian Arctic, shivering with terror and cold, hoping the thing that had come hunting her team was really gone. 

A few had been a mixed bag, for good or ill: on hard dirt, cold and in pain -- but with Captain America curled around her, protecting her from the elements and enemies alike. On Natasha's couch, smelling of her own vomit and nose clogged with tears, her heart a million degrees lighter after a long night of cathartic weeping rage. In the comfortable bed of a man who loved her...and with whom she knew she could not stay. 

Sometimes she woke up to a perfect world: in her bedroom at the Nest, in the one place of safety she trusted absolutely, Clint's body pressed to hers at hip and side. His arm draped over her shoulder, his mouth on her neck, the air heavy with the scent of his clean sweat. 

She swam up out of sleep with that last feeling, that warm contented peace, the little flush of arousal. A long strong arm arced over her to rest against the mattress; a deep rumble of almost-speech resonated through her skull. She felt the touch of a mouth to the back of her next, firm and hot. She smiled and arched her back a little, loving the ticklish shivery feel of those full sensual lips against her bare skin-- 

"Milli moy," whispered the man kissing her. 

Approximately a nano-second later Bobbi was plastered against the rough stone wall of the little monastic bedroom, breathing hard, staring in horror at Bucky Barnes. There was just enough early dawn light in trickling down from the high narrow window she could make out his face. 

He was plastered against the opposite wall, still on the bed, his bionic arm flat on the stones. His other hand was clutching his hair, dragging it out of his eyes. His mouth opened, the beginning of a some half-wailed negation. 

She pointed a vicious finger at him. "Shut the fuck up, Barnes." 

His mouth snapped shut, leaving them maybe an arms length away from each in the freezing air, both inadequately dressed. Just staring at each other. Bobbi took a deep breath, in through the nose, in and in, oxygen flooding her lungs and brain. She held it, ticking through the list of chemical interactions happening in her body right now, using it to center her thoughts. 

She let out the breath and sat down next to Barnes on the bed. He shifted away from her enough they weren't touching, then stopped moving. Bobbi leaned against the cold stone wall and smiled. "Well, that settles that, then, right?" 

"Settles what?" Barnes said slowly, cautiously. 

"Are we attracted to each other? Answer: yes," she said. 

"I'm not--" He cut himself off. "Yeah, I am. I wasn't exactly been living it up after I escaped Pierce but I've been around a few women. Never once mistook any of'em for Natasha. Not even half asleep. But your hair...smelled like hers to me, there in the darkness." 

"It's pheromonal , I'd think," she said absently. 

"I guess. But I'm still...I'd never touch you...not without consent...and I never meant anything like that when we lay down." He ducked his head, letting his hair fall in front of his face. "I'm sorry." 

"I'm not," she said, gently taking his flesh hand in both of hers. He flinched but didn't pull further away. "You seemed like Clint to me -- there was no lack of consent. I was happy to be touched. And we both stopped as soon as we realized what was happening. But yeah, that freaked me out for a second. I'm not used to being attracted to the other men on the team that way." 

"Not even Thor and Steve?" Bucky said incredulously then seemed to deeply regret the question. 

Bobbi laughed and deliberately laid her head on his shoulder. "Thor's...Thor's too pretty to be real. My mind knows he's hot but the rest of me just wants to play Call of Duty with him. Steve's...problematic for me, with the pantsfeelings. They're there but they're...if I touched him like that it would feel like incest. He's my BROTHER. He kissed me once, full on the mouth, to shock me out of something. That didn’t feel half as good as you kissing my neck." She turned towards him. "Clint and I are married, not blind. You and I are attracted to each other; that's not a betrayal of anything." 

Bucky turned towards her, disengaging his hand and brushing at her cheek. "I wouldn't want to scare you. As tough as you are I could...if I forgot myself...I'm really strong, Bobbi. I could--" 

"Yeah, but you won't. I trust you, James Buchanan Barnes. Here--" She lay back down on the bed and pulled him down too, this time with him as the little spoon. "That solves the smelling the hair problem." 

"I can still smell your hair. It's only a couple inches further away," he said in an exasperated tone. But he settled down onto the bed willingly enough, letting his metal arm take his weight. They both fell back into an uneasy sleep.

In way to short a time they heard the church bells caroling, calling the monks to morning prayers. Since they’d slept fully clothed they just stripped the bed and made their way to the main building. The monks had been pretty uneasy about having a woman around the place and had stuck them in an unused barrack on the far side of the compound. They had to walk through the medicinal herb garden in the centre courtyard. There was a thick dry fog wreathing the space, so thick they couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. The sun was just up, from the lightness in the east, but they still had to pick their way carefully around the plant beds and neatly trimmed shrubs.

“I smell bread baking,” Bobbi murmured in English.

Bucky took a deep breath, the fog lying oddly against his throat. “I smell bread _burning _,” he murmured back. Just the beginning of wheat and yeast scorching. And…under the cool quiet of the fog and the toning bells, no other sounds. He stopped and laid a hand on her arm. She turned and looked at him. They both nodded at the same time and drew their stolen guns. Bucky watched her flip a knife into her off hand, reversed to lie against the inside of her arm.__

____

____

They both went from walking normally to the stalking gait of the hunters of men. Hitting the door to the main building, Bucky listened intently for a moment, then gestured at her. She pulled the door open enough to slid in. A beat later he pulled it wider and joined her. She was up against a thick stone buttress, looking down the corridor towards the church. 

The thick double doors were open, showing a whitewashed chapel, bare and plain as the aesthetic of the Russian Orthodox Church often was, the flip side of the opulence, icons and gold leaf of the Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed in Moscow 

_(He’d gone there to pray once. He remembered that. On the 4th of July, one year…some year…he couldn’t remember when. Not because he believed—he didn’t know himself, how could he know god?—but because someone he loved had faith and he wanted to honor that. He’d prayed, he thinks now, to die.)_

The chapel looked empty. 

They made their tense, alert way down the corridor, both soundless against the stone floor. Bucky, when he was in the anchor spot, admired Bobbi’s technique and skill. She was easily Natasha’s equal in this kind of thing; she would have been a magnificent Black Widow. But then that was her job— ‘utility infielder’ she called herself. Able to be anyone else on the team in a pinch. 

Eventually they were flanking the double doors 

By this point the smell of burning bread was strong and from inside the room, to either side, they could both hear breathing and shuffling 

There were bodies stacked up, waiting for them to enter. 

She looked at him across the space, gesturing with her gun. 

Your call, boss 

He leaned back and thought a moment. He could smell metal, male sweat, cigarettes, incense, candle wax and terrible fear. 

Bucky made an emphatic hand gesture. Bobbi raised her fist in reply 

They both backed up a step and dove into the room. 

The tasers fired from either side of the door missed them, Bucky by a country mile and Bobbi by a hairsbreadth. They both shoulder rolled down the main aisle. There were no pews, just chairs. No where to hide. 

They both came up shooting. 

Bobbi got the guys on either side of the door. Bucky got the guys behind them, four shots, four men down in sprays of blood. The sound of the pistols reverberated off the stone walls was like thunder, drowning out the sudden surge of screaming and howling from either side. 

Then a man yelled, so loudly they heard him over the echos. 

“Soldat! Avenger! Drop your guns or we kill these god-bothering fools!” 

Both Bobbi and Bucky turned and focussed on the source of the yell. Emerging from a room behind the altar was a small man who moved like a cloud, light and smooth and weightless. Behind him was another man, not much taller, holding a Kalashnikov comfortably slung across his chest. His hand was up and he was waving at the side of the chapel. 

Kneeling with their hands behind their heads were the dozen or so monks, dressed in dark robes. They were surrounded by a semi-circle of hard looking armed men. 

Bucky punched up his fist in the “hold” gesture to Bobbi. She pulled up her gun and nodded, then looked around the room. 

“You can smell the testosterone in here,”she said sardonically. 

The man who’d yelled stalked forward until he was a few feet from them. Bucky eyed him, struck with something like a memory. The man was eyeing him back, his face set and blank and cold. 

“You know me, Soldier?” He hissed. 

“If I do, I don’t want to,” Bucky returned. “Let these men go. Now.” 

Bobbi whistled and waved her hand at Bucky. “Hard. Case.” 

The man with the gun moved his glare to her. “Be silent, woman.” 

“Go fuck yourself, sport,” she replied amicably, in colloquial Muscovite Russian 

He slapped her, fast as lightening. 

Fast as…someone not fully human anymore. 

Bobbi reeled, turning 360 and raised her own hand, knife flashing out. If she cut him, the man would kill her. Bucky’s bionic hand circled her wrist, stopping her dead. She glared at him through a swelling cheek, chest heaving, then — the rage went out of her and she nodded. 

“Your weapons to the nearest chair, Soldat. You and the woman. Then walk to the altar and stand facing it with your hands your head. 

Bobbi looked at Bucky. Bucky looked at Bobbi. The same calculations were running through their eyes. 

Eight assailants in the room. Seven of them armed with military grade hardware; then there was the little man wandering aimlessly around the back wall of the chapel, idly running a hand over the white wash. He appeared unarmed but there was something very strange about him. 

They could probably take out five of the men, including the leader; the group with the monks was just a meter or so too far away. They would both take at least three bullets and the collateral damage would be total. 

Collateral damage? 

That was the Winter Solider in his head. Bucky told himself the truth. 

The monks would all die; Bobbi would take critical to mortal wounds. He would take possibly mortal wounds. 

He put his weapons down, all of them. Through clenched teeth Bobbi did the same. Brushing past the leader they walked to the altar. 

There was a rush of motion behind them and they were both slammed face first into the wood and stone, multiple people holding them both down, hands pulled up between their shoulder blades. Handcuffs attached to metal collars with a thick chain. 

Then they were pulled back to standing, both of them bleeding from the mouth, Bobbi’s eye going black, Bucky spitting part of a tooth out. 

Thrown to the ground, they looked up from their knees at the leader, his gun now slung across his back. He eyed Bucky with satisfaction, Bobbi with distaste. In his hand as the Luger Bucky had been carrying. 

Stepping back he raised it and pointed it at Bobbi. 

Beside him—through his haze of pain and rage, through the growing noise in his head, the lethal need and violent want of the Winter Solider straining against _center self human Avenger_ — Bucky heard her laugh. “There are faster ways to commit suicide you dumb fuck.” She slurred a little, through the swelling of her cheek. “Bullet’s out of his chest. Toxin’s out of his system. Only thing holding back the Soldier is the Avenger now. You kill me, that’s the keystone in that wall. He comes off his leash and you’re all painfully, messily dead.” 

The leader stared at her, his jaw working, then looked at Bucky, as though seeing him clearly for the first time. 

“He would still be able to move well enough, with it in his back,” he said, musingly. They were both speaking in smooth, easy Russian. 

It was making Bucky’s spine hurt. Something about the man’s voice was so… 

“Hit him in the chest. He turned into it. I extracted it — it’s in my jacket pocket.” Bobbi coughed, spitting blood onto the floor. 

The leader stared at her, something dawning in his eyes. “You are not the Widow. I thought, your hair—bleach but…you are the other one, the archer’s whore.” 

Bobbi rolled her eyes. “He’s never paid me for sex, so no, not his whore. Not that it matters, little man. Whore or otherwise right now I’m your best goddamn friend. I’m the only thing keeping you _alive_.” 

The leader turned to Bucky. “Is that true, Soldier? Does that imperialist dog Captain America have your balls in so tight a vise you would jeopardize a mission for one woman’s life? That is not what you taught us…what you taught me.” 

Bucky jerked backwards, his sudden massive choking intake of breath loud as thunder, then jerked forward again to rest his head on the stone, shaking and gasping. 

“I remember you,” he whispered in Russian through spit and blood and bile, into the air, into the darkness behind his eyes. “I remember you, Niko Constantin. Wolf Spider.” He raised his head, looking up into the eyes he now knew, seeing the murderous madness and devious calculation he’d warned the Red Room about so many years ago. 

The male trials of the Black Widow program had been spectacularly disastrous. Nearly all of the participants had ended up dead or crippled—save one. 

Niko Constantin. They’d named him the Wolf Spider and called on the Winter Soldier to train him. 

The Winter Solider in turn had discovered his psychosis, the killing rage and nihilistic ecstasy at the heart of him. Perhaps it had always been there, perhaps it had been created by the program. All the Winter Solider knew is one day his charge was gone from the barracks and he was being put back into the ice. 

He’d always assumed they’d executed Niko. 

Apparently not. 

Here and now, he was older, his face harder and colder and the fires of his madness banked to embers in his eyes. What gulag had he been consigned to? What hellish tortures had they subjected him to, to be able to temper that desperate chaos in his head even this far? 

Bucky groaned and shuddered, the Soldier’s memories trying to pull him down into the cold and dark again. 

“Buck, listen to my voice. You are James Buchanan Barnes, you are Steve Rogers best friend. You are Natasha Romanoff’s man. You are an Avenger. Come back to me, Bucky. Come back.” 

He gasped, his scattered thoughts pulling and holding onto Bobbi’s voice like a life line. 

“I’m…I’m here. Hear. I hear you.” 

“That’s good because I need you to explain who the fuck in Russia had the fetish about arachnids…seriously, are there even spiders in Siberia?” She sounded cheerful and irreverent but Bucky could make out the desperate relief in her tone. 

“Enough. ” snapped Niko. He looked from them to the monks then to his men. “You and you, make sure every entrance to this chapel is barred from the outside. We’ll leave the monks locked in here—I prefer not to commit blasphemy if possible and by the time someone comes to free them we will be long gone. You, you—gag them both. I want my good friend the Soldier to do a little silent contemplation of his existence and I suspect the only way we shut the woman up is to kill her.” 

“Heck yes, sport, I even talk in my sleep!” Bobbi cried out cheerfully before she and Bucky had scraps of dirty cloth stuffed in their mouths, bags pulled over their heads. They were frog marched out of the chapel, choking on dirt and darkness, headed to gods knew what fate. 

***** 

_Interlude, StarkRomania_

Tony shoved himself back from his work table, letting his rolling chair spin slowly as he sailed across the room to where the rest of the Avengers were standing in various poses of interest or irritation. Natasha was sitting on the closest work table, her legs drawn up and her face very blank. 

“I guess you’re wondering why I called you all here today—” 

“Jarvis advised us you had recovered crucial information from Bobbi’s communication device,” rumbled Thor. “There is naught mysterious about our gathering.” 

Tony threw up his hands. “Well fine then, just wreck my fun!” 

“Stark,” growled Clint. “Bobbi’s been gone over a week. I’d be in a bad mood just from not getting laid but I’d like her back in one piece too.” He took a sharp nudge from Natasha’s knee in the middle of his back. “Barnes too _I guess_ ,” Clint conceded. Then he turned and stuck his tongue out at Natasha, both of them grinning. 

Steve chopped his hand in the area. “What did you find, Tony?” 

Stark waved his hand in the area and pulled up a data fountain, chemical formulae in a repeating loop. 

“The last readout I could pull off Bobbi’s phone was a list of chemicals. All bad stuff, various radioactive substances, heavy metals, neurotoxins. In weirdly small amounts though and all contaminated by lead. I asked Jarvis to reconstruct the approximate size and shape of the object she’d scanned before her goggles got shorted out out.” 

Another graphic popped up. 

“A bullet,” Sam said. 

“They shot James with it, whomever set them up,” Natasha said softly. “That would have killed Bobbi.” 

“What would that stuff do to him?” Steve said, his brow furrowed. 

“Make him weak as a kitten and keep him that was as long as it was in his body.” 

“Bobbi would remove it. She is wise and canny; she would know she needs his strength as well as her skill,” said Thor. 

“That’s what I thought too,” Bruce Banner said, coming out from behind a small partition carrying a small electronic device. “We found no readings for those materials on site. Which means the bullet’s either still in Barnes or more likely Bobbi’s found a way to extract it, like Thor said. Either way, the other interesting thing about that stuff is it’s ‘chemically’ hot as hell and most of the components are easy to scan if you know what you’re looking for. Lights up a couple different scanners like a Christmas tree. This one, for instance.” 

Bruce made a flicking gesture over the item he was carrying, producing a map of Constanta and the surrounding area. A glowing dot appeared in the docklands, then jumped abruptly into the ocean. They followed the line as it meandered down the shore, then onto it some small distance away. It lingered near a small shopping arcade then made a beeline on a major road to the outskirts of the city. It stopped in the middle of no where for a bit, then took to the highway towards Bucharest. 

It came to rest on a land mark with the name “Tropaeum Traiani” not very far from the city. 

“Ah, Roman ruins,” said Thor thoughtfully. “Jupiter is a difficult fellow when he’s been drinking but I don’t think he’s bothered with Midgard since the last time my father sent him packing, after the incident with the swan. Shouldn’t be a problem.” 


	6. Winter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Captive and helpless, Bucky Barnes faces off against the Wolf Spider — and the Winter Soldier.

_Bucky Barnes was dreaming...or something..._

_In the ice he'd dreamt, just a little. A dream a month, a week. He dreamed of red roses in the snow and a blond man screaming a name that had once been his. He dreamed of fire and death. He dreamed of falling._

_This wasn't quite the same. This wasn't nightmare imagery or desperate longing._

_This was a woman, changeable as the tides and solid as rock, not the fire and wind of his winter rose. She made him feel exasperated and exhilarated at the same time, wanting to laugh and scream._

_They were hauling themselves out of cold filthy water, onto a filthier pier. The only light came from a weakly glowing lamp a quarter kilometer away. He felt his left arm twitch a little and tried to force it to move from where it hung limply against his side. His thumb gouged a splintery strip along the edge of one board._

_“Oh, that’s good!,” she remarked in that light, bright tone of hers. “Self -repair systems are making good.”_

_He nodded and pushed himself to standing with a single thrust of his other arm; she was already on her feet. He felt a thick head rush as he rose and nearly toppled again. The woman grabbed him under his left arm, let it drape like a dead weight over her shoulders._

_“We need medical supplies and clean clothes, I think I know where we are, there’s a commercial street two blocks away.” She tugged him in that direction. As she did so she leaned into him, speaking softly into his ear. “And thank you again for not ordering me to—_

_**”…KILL YOU!”**_ Bobbi screamed, jolting him awake. He surged up and was stopped abruptly by straps on his chest, arms, legs. His whole body went cold as ice.

The chair. He was back in the chair.

Panic brought bile into the back of his mouth.

_notagainnotagainnonononononononononooooooooooooooooooooo_

He looked around wildly: he was in some sort of rock chamber, with a rough hewn ceiling only a few feet over his head. It was well lit; electric lights strung along clay covered walls painted with archaic looking figures of animals and people.

He was sitting in what felt like the center of the room and all around him were armed men in nondescript clothing. Directly in front of him Bobbi was fighting the Wolf Spider.

She was hurt, favoring her injured foot which had turned out to be a strain and not a break; this couldn’t be helping that. Her left shoulder was canted at a weird angle and there was blood across the entire right side of her face from a gushing cut over that eye. She was coiled in a fighter’s stance, her right hand in front of her. Her lips were still open from her scream. 

Niko was standing up straight, his posture and body language indolent, dismissive. Bobbi weaved on her feet, obviously just about strung out. Niko stepped forward and directed an open hand slap at her mouth with a “there’s no way this will miss” energy about him.

Bobbi dodged it, not by backing away, but by lurch/fall/jumping forward, into his body. His arm slammed into her injured shoulder and she screamed in pain but momentum was momentum. She was bigger than he was; she knocked him onto his back. In the breathless moment of pure shock she got her knees onto his hips and rose up, her right hand hammering down into his solar plexus, his stomach.

Not his face or chest. Even in this state Mockingbird wasn’t stupid enough to punch into bone with her bare hand. Niko howled and had it cut off abruptly as she sunk a twisting knuckle strike into his diaphragm.

Bucky let out a strangled yell of triumph. He was bound, helpless, terrified and sick to his stomach but he was still an Avenger. 

He was. He was still an Avenger. He was still himself. Whatever had happened to him after they knocked him out hadn’t brought the Winter Soldier back yet. He was still Bucky Barnes. 

Thugs descended on Bobbi, ripping her off their leader who staggered coughing and retching to his feet. The blond woman hung in their grip, blood dripping off her chin, her eyes alight. She spoke now, a stream of Russian words, the most vile insults he’d ever heard strung together like a nursery rhyme. Niko hissed and grabbed her by the throat, forcing her head up. He squeezed, the tendons in his hand visibly flexing. 

She cursed him till her breath ran out, her eyes rolling back in her head.

“Don’t you dare!” Bucky yelled. He surged up enough the bonds on hjis wrists strained with an audible creak and snap. Niko’s hand popped open and he whipped around.

His eyes were…insane.

Behind him Bobbi drew a ragged breath, coughed and gagged, then did it again. She spat blood at Niko’s feet, loudly. Bucky realized she was trying to draw the Wolf Spider’s attention off him.

She spraying blood like a Halloween display, Niko’d obviously just beaten her to a pulp and she was trying to protect _Bucky_. Somewhere in the back of his head, under the fear, he remembered that was what it had been like in the war, with the Commandos—that was what it had been like to be part of a team.

Niko did turn long enough to raise his hand to her. She hissed at him through bloody teeth, not flinching in the slightest. 

“If you do anything to him, anything, I will rip off whatever minuscule trinket you have between your legs with my hands and choke you to death with it. I will obliterate you. I will destroy the memory of your existence on this earth.”

Her raging monologue cut out on another coughing fit. Niko cocked his head at her like a curious parrot. “You…decadent American that you are, you should have been a Black Widow.”

Bucky almost laughed to hear his own thoughts parroted back at him, then had it catch in his throat at Bobbi’s response. 

She glared. “There is only one Black Widow and on my best day I am not her equal…and you—you aren’t fit to lick the soles of her shoes.”

Strangely, the Wolf Spider nodded at that. “Oh, never fear Avenger. I would never consider myself equal to the sainted Romanov. In a just world I would be her loyal servant. Instead, I must seek to destroy her. In death, she will take back the dignity that was stolen from her by your people. And in her blood I will write the history of the new Red Room. Well, her blood—and the rest of your team mates. It is a better end than you deserve.”

Bucky didn’t think he could get colder but he did. He knew what Niko planned now. 

Bring back the Winter Soldier long enough to slaughter the Avengers. 

*****

_Interlude: the roof top quinjet landing pad of StarkRomania headquarters_

Clint was doing his pre flight checks with the dogged thoroughness of a man distracting himself in routine tasks. Natasha slid into the co-pilots seat with the ease of many repetitions and silently watched his strong scarred hands slip across the flight controls, flick toggles, adjust dials.

“They’re alive, you know,” he grunted eventually. “If they weren’t we’d already have their bodies.”

“Not perhaps a great relief,” Natasha said softly. “The schematics of that slug…it was—”

“Red Room, yeah, I know. You’re gonna take that as this whole thing being your fault, right?” Clint looked up a her, under lit by the blue glow of the control panel. “Could be on Barnes’ head. Could be on Steve’s. Could be on no ones. We’re the line in the sand, Nat. Lot of people stepping up to go toe to toe with us for any reason and no reason.” He squinted at her. “Frankly, much as I love you it’s one reason my little bird and I get on like we do. She takes responsibility without… _wallowing in it_ like you and Barnes do.”

She nodded, pursing her lips. “I think I’ve gotten worse since James returned to me. Old patterns are so easy to slip back in to.” She leaned forward suddenly and grabbed his hands, holding them still. “But what I’ve been saying to you both, Clinton — it’s still true. And it’s getting worse, since the abduction. As wonderful as you and she are together you’re so wrapped up in each other now sometimes I can’t tell where one of you stops. I love you both too much not to say I think it’s not healthy and well…our lives are so dangerous. Losing one of you will half-kill me but to lose you both in quick succession might burn me alive. To say nothing of the damage it would do to the team.” 

He freed one hand and wrapped it on top of both of hers. “I agree. She agrees. We talked it out. Have you talked to Bucky about it yet? It’s not the only solution but it’s a bloody good one and well…this is me you’re talkin’ about. I’m not one to turn down an opportunity for extra fun.” He grinned at her and she grinned back, remembering long happy sessions of play and pleasure, of love and trust. If it hadn’t been for Clint’s simple easy care, his undemanding love, she might never have recovered at all from losing James the first time and certainly without his friendship she’d never have survived learning the Winter Soldier was still alive and a monster once more. 

Her smile turned tremulous and tender. “I think we all need to have it out together or he simply won’t believe you’re okay with it. We’ll have to plan something soon.”

“Let’s get’em back in one piece first,” he said firmly, then touched the comm button on the main panel. “We’re ready Cap. Lock and load.”

*****

They chained Bobbi to the wall, brutally bisecting some ancient relief with a ring and collar imbedded into the stone. She slumped against the rock and whitewash, breathing raggedly, whimpering once in a while. Then Niko approached him as he struggled futilely against the restraints binding him to the chair. 

“I could not steal the proper item from Siberia — even the clearances I had would not reveal to me the location of your pen, Soldat—”

“Don’t call me that,’ he snarled to hide his growing panic. “I’m Bucky Barnes. Not the Winter Soldier.” He was helpless, hemmed in on all sides by metal and men and the slowly spreading ice in his veins. 

Niko patted him gently on the cheek. “You are both, Soldat, even now. The struggle between your two natures causes you pain. I am here to take the pain away.” He smiled, his madness blooming on his face again, like a blood red sun that did nothing to warm the ground below. “This would have been so much easier with my special concoction in your blood. You would have been so docile. Now it must be struggle and pain. I am sorry about that. You were a magnificent teacher; without your lessons I would not have survived the gulag so long the very government forgot who I was, who my loyal soldiers were—” he gestured around him, “—even the very purpose of the Red Room itself. I found all this in an underground bunker in Moscow, buried deep and choked with dust.”

He looked up, over Bucky’s head. “Bring the king his crown. Let it begin.”

Bucky screamed when they fitted the web of electrodes over his skull, forced the mouth guard between his teeth. He spit it out again. He hurled himself against the restraints, hearing them creak again, pop and moan under the strain of his strength and pain and fear. The mechanism whirred to life—he heard the sound of an extra generator kicking in—and electricity began to crackle around his temples. 

_painpainpainpainburningpainburninggoawayfromitgoawayletitdriveyouawaytheonlyreliefwasinthewordslistentothewordsthewordsthewords_

“Longing,” Niko said, dropping his head down close as a lover to Bucky’s ear. 

“Rusted.”

“NOOOOOO.”

“Furnace.”

“STOP.”

“Daybreak.”

“Don’t do this!” It was beginning he could feel the ice creep and rise, inching up from the cold stone into his feet, they went numb then his legs then his ass. Up into his spine like poison till the pain and the ice and the words were the only thing left and Bucky was fading away into the cold and darkness behind the Soldier’s eyes.

“Seventeen. Benign. Nine. Home—”

And a woman’s voice cut across Nico’s, ringing and clear. “YOU DON’T HAVE TO COMPLY. YOU ARE JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES YOU ARE AN AVENGER YOU ARE MY FRIEN—” Her voice cut out on the sound of a fist meeting flesh. 

“Homecoming,” Nico hissed for a second time. “One.”

There was a pause and the darkness rose up all around him.

“Freight car.” 

The darkness fell, blotting him out. 

Silence.

Black.

Then the Soldier’s voice, cold and hard and even, speaking Russian.

“I am ready to comply.”

Bucky fell, screaming.

*****

“Soldat?” Nico said the title cautiously, staring at the other man.

“I am ready to comply,” the bound man repeated, almost irritably.

“Soldat, turn your head to the left. Do you see the woman there?”

“Yes.”

“She is an enemy of the State. Kill her.” 

The Winter Solider rose in one smooth motion as his bonds were released and advanced towards the woman. She was staring at him, her face a mask of blood and horror. 

Nico Constantin, the Wolf Spider, could have sung with pure joy.

The woman raised her hands to her neck, tugging at the collar, gasping out frantic words to the big dark man walking towards her. 

“Buck! Bucky! You don’t have to comply with anything that evil asshole says. Bucky!” She nearly screamed.

Nico allowed himself a moment of pique that THIS was the first time she’d exhibited any fear in the entire time he’d had her captive. 

The Winter Solider stopped a moment. “Who is Bucky?” He growled in Russian. 

“You! You’re Bucky!” She shouted back at him, in English. “You’re James Buchanan Barnes. You’re Steve Rogers’ best friend; Natasha’s partner. You’re an Avenger! You! You’re Bucky! You’re my friend! Come back to me!” 

Her voice rose to a wail as the Winter Solder started forward again. His metal hand wrapped around the chain on her collar and snapped it away from the wall. 

Nico could no longer see her, big corn-fed American harlot that she was, the Winter Soldier’s big frame covered her nearly totally from view. 

She howled and appeared to strike at him but he was too close, too fast, too strong. He bullied her into the rough stone of the wall, scraping her face against it and wrapped his flesh arm around her neck from behind. 

His lats flexed under the thin cheap cotton of his filthy shirt and she screamed, a thin despairing noise.

It cut off abruptly. His arm jerked, accompanied with a dull crunching noise. 

Eyes empty, the Winter Soldier turned back to Nico and his men, letting the woman’s corpse fall gracelessly to the ground behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that cryptic conversation between Clint and Natasha will be explained, I swear.


	7. The Fog Clears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> End game. Wolf Spider vs Black Widow ... and other things

“All right, where’d the fog come from?” Bruce asked anxiously. “There was no fog when we landed and now there’s fog.”

Steve looked at Clint and Sam in the pilot and co-pilot seats. Sam gestured at the instrument panel. “According to that there’s no reason for it.”

“Great,” Steve muttered, then raised his voice. “So either a thick fog sprang up in the middle of the day for no reason or whomever has Bucky and Bobbi has an enhanced with them. Be ready for anything. Tony, do you still have a reading on that bullet?”

“Yeah, it’s…well, about thirty five feet above us?” (1) He peeled his face mask back and regarded them all with a confused look. “Since they aren’t suspended in mid air…I got nothing, sorry. We’re just going to have go out and look for them.”

“At least the Romanian government was willing to clear the area of tourists for us,” Natasha said. 

Steve squinted out into the wall of white surrounding the jet. “Thor, Sam, Tony get up and see if you can get over the mess out there and discern any details. Clint, Nat with me; Bruce, hang back. I hope we won’t need a Code Green.”

“Me too,” the slight dark man said, shivering a little. “I hate wrecking places with historical significance.”

The Tropaeum Traiani was a modern reproduction of an ancient monument, built to commemorate the victory of Trajan over the Dacians, a local tribe, in 101-102 CE. It stood on a lonely outcropping of stone, brooding above the battlefield where 4000 Roman soldiers had died. The quinjet rested on the ancient bones of a conquering army. 

Steve suppressed a shiver of his own, to mimic Bruce. 

He, Clint and Natasha paced next to each other, almost in each other’s foot steps. Sam, Tony and Thor were already lost in the air above them and they could no longer see the quinjet though they weren’t more than a few dozen feet away.

The fog swirled…against the wind.

Almost gently, Captain America reached out his hands and knocked both Hawkeye and Black Widow to the ground, ducking down behind his shield the instant after. 

The crack of the three high powered rifle shots came a moment later, two of them slicing the fog where Clint and Nat’s heads had been, the third impacting the vibranium and falling to the ground at his feet.

The comm system crackled to life.

“I’ve located some bad guys, Cap,” yelled Sam.

Suddenly the air was alive with bullets.

*****

_Twenty Minutes Earlier_

As the Winter Soldier stood still and cold eyed next to Mockingbird’s body a man rushed into the chamber. He sprinted up to the Wolf Spider and babbled at him in frantic Russian.

“The Avengers! They are nearly here! We have contact with their jet, only a few minutes away!”

“What?” Niko snapped, then looked around the room. “Did one of you fools place the decoy phone call without my permission? Speak up!”

A wave of discomfort and fear surged around the room. Every one of the men muttered disavowal, denial, concern. Niko ground his teeth, slashing looks at the Winter Soldier then gestured once.

“Spartak go wake the little mutant and get him making his fogs. Soldat—” he beckoned the Winter Soldier. “Attend me.”

The thing that had been Bucky Barnes stepped forward firmly, then stumbled, gasping. He dropped to one knee, clutching his head and moaning. No matter how they pushed and prodded him he wouldn’t move. He was mumbling “I am ready to comply” over and over though. 

Niko snarled in rage and slapped him hard, once, twice but the Winter Solider just kept mumbling in his pained crouch. “Weakling! Arkady, Timur, stay here. If he’s not up on his feet and ready to kill in five minutes hurt him till he moves. The rest of you, with me.” The Wolf Spider and his men filed out on the trot, readying their weapons as they did. 

The two men left behind stared at their charge in a mix of fear and contempt. 

“What do you think is wrong with him?” The taller of the two said, circling the kneeling man warily.

“Too much time in the decadent West, I suppose,” the other man offered, then drew a knife. He stepped forward and brandished it. “Get up, Soldat, or I’ll cut that pretty face of yours. Get up!” he ordered, then slashed at the Winter Soldier’s exposed cheek.

A small strong hand prisoned his wrist like a vise. “I really like his pretty face,’ said a cheerful voice in English. It was the last sound Arkady heard as the blond American—the dead woman—applied careful pressure to his neck and blood stopped flowing to his brain.

*****

Bobbi looked at Bucky as he strangled the other man unconscious in a similar fashion and dropped his body on the floor much as he’d dropped her a few minutes earlier. He looked up at her and they stared in silence for a few beats.

“You,” she said slowly, “are SUCH a PRICK, Barnes.”

“What? What else could I have done?” he said.

She made an irritated moue with her lips. “I grant you that but you’re still a prick.” She smiled at him slowly and he returned it slowly. “Nice move with crunching the collar for the neck break though.”

He shook his head. “I’m just glad you’re quick on the uptake. I was scared I was going to have to say something but you caught the wink.”

She grabbed his arm and looked at the chair, her eyes wary. “Why didn’t it work, Buck? Can you tell me why you’re you and not…him?”

He shrugged off her hand. “I think it was because you interrupted the sequence. He repeated home—a word. But it didn’t feel the same from the start. Wrong equipment or they did something in Siberia he didn’t know about. I don’t know—”

She grabbed his face in both hands and forced him to look at her. They stared at each other in silence.

Then she dropped her hands. “Well, if you’re not Bucky you do a good impression of him.” She dropped down and started relieving her victim of weapons. “Now we know where the fog came from too.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, taking two hand guns and a frankly sketchy AR-15 off the man at his feet. “So, the team is walking into a trap.”

“Well that’s one way to look at it. There’s another way,” she said, her eyes sparking. “The team is the anvil and we—we’re the hammer.” She found her jacket where it had been tossed aside. “I didn’t keep that bullet for sentimental reasons, I figured it was so ‘hot’ it was traceable. I’ll lay you heavy odds I’m right and that’s how the team found us.”

“Traceable means…targetable,” Bucky said. 

“Yeah,” Bobbi checked the action on the automatic she’d just taken and smiled at him. “Let’s go squish a Wolf Spider.” 

*****

Bobbi found her batons wrapped up in her jacket and stood preceptively straighter with them in her hands. The Avengers cautiously exited the…well, it was pretty clearly an ancient burial chamber or ceremonial site.

“Roman,” Bobbi said, tapping a panel of worn fresco set into the wall next to the door. “I think we’re literally inside that monument we passed on the way in.”

“That means the only place the quinjet can land is east, right, just past the drop off where they built this?” Bucky titled his head, looking up at the ceiling a moment. He could hear gunfire, lots of it, muffled by the rock but coming from the right. 

Bobbi bit her bottom lip and despite the situation he felt a thick tug in his groin. He wanted to kiss the red spot she’d made, see if she tasted like Natasha; she smelled different, heavier and spicer. He thought she would taste the same way. 

“Yeah,” she nodded. “It’s a bad spot to be in the fog. Niko and his thugs will have cover by the hill and that patch of stone walls circling the base. And we’ll have to take that winding exposed staircase down and it’ll take forever and my ankle is holding together with spit and a prayer right now.”

“So we take the direct route,” Bucky said with a snort. “It’s what, four stories? I could fall that in my sleep, even with 180 extra pounds on my back.”

“Save a horse, ride a super soldier?” Bobbi asked brightly.

“Idiot,” he responded, but he was laughing with it. 

*****

The Wolf Spider checked his watch again, barely holding back a bellow of rage at the incompetence he had to deal with. Arkady and Timur should have had the Soldat up and out here by now. 

Not that things were going badly—his pet mutant, the vague little man sitting in the dirt behind this patch of stonework, had created such a thick wall of fog not even the big man they called a god could dispel it. There had been little or no retaliation from the Avengers, a few bullets and uncannily accurate arrows at most. Where as the Wolf Spider and his men could simply spray in the direction of the jet, keeping the Americans pinned down.

That wasn’t how he wanted to end this though. He wanted to stalk behind the Soldat as the man executed his former friends one by one. He wanted to stand over the Black Widow’s corpse as it cooled. He wanted to see agony on Captain America’s face before he died.

Perhaps he’d keep the archer alive long enough to let him see his wife’s body, to know he’d failed her so utterly. 

His phone beeped and he grabbed it and answered it in one motion. 

“What?”

“He’s coming out of the tunnel now,” that sounded like Spartak, whom he’d left behind at the entrance to the underground complex.

Niko laughed and hung up the phone, then yelled out to his men. “Cease Fire!” 

The chattering cacophony of automatic weapons petered out, leaving a world muffled by fog. Niko heard three noises almost at the same time: something sailed through the air above him; a second object cut the air and plinked into the rock beside the mutant’s head and the third was a loud thud from the direction of the hill, as though someone had dropped a sack of rocks over the side of the drop.

The last had to have been the Soldat leaping to the ground. 

But what were the first tw—

*****

Steve crouched behind his shield, his thoughts snapping out a mile a minute. He couldn’t advance his ground fighters in to the hail of weapons fire. He couldn’t snipe his opponents from the air, not even Iron Man’s sensors could penetrate the uncanny fog. He could call a Code Green but without clear direction it was always possible the Hulk would simply blunder into the countryside and wreak havoc. 

He supposed they would have to risk retreating to the quinjet and leaving the area, at least until they were clear of the fog…leaving Bucky and Bobbi at the mercy of this clever and devious enemy. Beside him he saw Clint surge up just enough to clear his bow and fire at the sound of the guns; a faint yell of surprised pain sounded. Clint rolled onto his back, his face set into a grim mask of fierce satisfaction. He was bleeding sluggishly from two minor bullet wounds, one on his left bicep and one in his side. Nat stayed low to the ground at Steve’s side.

And suddenly there was silence. They had stopped shooting. 

He as much felt as heard the projectile cutting the air towards him, not a bullet a … grenade? 

Instinctively he snatched it from the air mid flight. 

He dropped back down, holding a rock wrapped in grimy cotton fabric. He unwrapped it one handed and two crudely drawn letters appeared: T A. They were printed in a shaky, hasty hand in a wet brown liquid that he smelled was blood. 

Bucky’s blood, in fact. 

Clint turned his head and looked down.

“Target Acquired,” he muttered. “That’s Bobbi’s slang for start shooting where I point you.”

Steve instantly over-rode the comm system. “Stark, scan for the bullet! Is it still above us?”

“No!” Stark called back in all their ears. “It just hit the ground about forty feet away from that mausoleum on the hill.”

“Paint it!” Steve yelled. “Avengers, target on Iron Man’s mark!”

Red lasers slashed through the fog just long enough that the whole team could triangulate their end point. 

Bullets, lightning, repulsor beams, arrows and a shield all converged on that spot in the next breath. 

*****

Niko knew something was wrong when the limp body of one of his men flew past him in the fog to slam into the mud near by in a groaning heap. 

His next clues were the energy bolts, bullets, arrows and a single thrown shield that practically obliterated the stone wall he was crouched behind with the mutant fog-caller. 

The vague little man screamed and threw himself to the ground, covering his head. Niko followed suit. 

A sudden swirl of wind whipped the dense white curtain away long enough that Niko caught a glimpse of what was clearly the Winter Soldier beating the shit out of one his men and behind him…that couldn’t be the woman? The dead woman? Niko scrambled in their direction on his hands and knees in confused rage, his vision narrowed by a pulsing blackness at the corner of his eyes.

The implications of that movement in the fog hit him in the next moment.

 

*****

“Cap!” Came Bruce’s voice through the coms, “whatever was controlling that fog just…got distracted? I can get readings through it now, it’s just…it’s just fog again!”

“I have this, my comrades!” Yelled Thor from above. 

There was a _thud_ as the Asgardian landed near by and then a high impossibly swift whirling sound. The fog swirled like milk in coffee and then funneled into a horizontal tornado, the end of which was a vortex formed by Mjolner being swung at the end of Thor’s hand.

The battlefield cleared, revealing a couple dozen or so armed men not to far away, some sheltering behind low stone walls, some standing in postures of confusion and at least five … fighting a big dark-haired man with a gleaming metal arm and a blond woman wielding a staff.

Mockingbird spun with furious grace, scything her two opponents off their feet and then raised a fist into the air. Clearly her voice rang out: “Avengers! Assemble!”

Hawkeye grinned, fiercely, and rolled to his feet from prone in one motion. Three arrows appeared in his fist and were gone again. Three screams of pain sounded and three men went down. The Avenging Archer advanced forward.

Captain America grinned to himself and moved up to cover Hawkeye’s open side. Black Widow surged forward to flank him. Above Iron Man and Falcon were already starting their strafing runs and they could all hear the sound of electricity crackling around Thor as he charged up.

Halfway to the opposing forces, a small man with madness in his eyes suddenly leapt up from the ground, from next to a prone body. Cap didn’t have time to assess what had happened as the madman drew a knife with a smooth motion and attacked the three Avengers…no, Black Widow.

All his ferocity seemed directed at her and he was incredibly fast. For a few passes he pressed her back and back, away from Cap and Hawkeye. Hawkeye released one more volley and turned, holding his bow as a hand weapon; Cap had already turned and taken a step towards the combatants. He had no fear of the men behind him; he’d seen the last of them go down screaming in pain with Hawkeye’s last shot.

They needn’t have bothered. 

Even as they watched the man landed his first—and only—blow, a glancing slice to Black Widow’s face that drew a line of crimson that matched her hair. He was snarling in Russian as he attacked, what sounded like mostly obscenities. The word “soldat” rang out clearly just as he struck.

As though that word had been a trigger of her own, Black Widow clicked over from “assessing opponent” to “death from above” mode. She flowed around him like water, not bothering to block or deflect any of his strikes. When he reached the end of whatever lunge or slash he had committed to she was simply no longer there. Her dancer’s grace and speed left him as open to her flashing hands and kicks as though he was standing still. 

In one particularly devastating move she kicked him in the jaw and on the down stroke of her leg wrapped it around his outstretched arm. Using her body weight and momentum she spun him 180 degrees, slamming his shoulders into the ground. His arm broke with three audible cracking noises and he lay still, on his back, moaning. 

When she turned, panting slightly, it was to Cap, Hawkeye, Falcon, Thor and Iron Man all watching her. They applauded in unison.

“You clowns,” she grumbled at them, shaking her head. Her face went serious suddenly and she pointed behind them. “Clinton, look to your wife.”

They all turned to see Bucky standing awkwardly over Bobbi, who was kneeling on the ground next to the prone body Cap had seen earlier. One hand was over her mouth and the other was gently brushing back the man’s short hair. 

She was visibly crying.

As the Avengers approached en masse, she looked up at them, her face a mixture of rage and three kinds of pain. She was filthy, streaked with blood and dirt, had a huge purple bruise on one cheek and a split lip. Bucky didn’t look much better, though he was standing still and frozen as a statue. 

Bobbi gestured at the body, wordless. 

Cap looked down. It was the corpse of a small man with olive skin. He was clearly dead from the gaping gunshot wound to his temple, made at such close range the skin was burnt from contact with the muzzle. Bobbi’s fingers had brushed back his hair line enough to show a crescent shaped scar on his skull. 

Falcon checked backwards. “Lobotomized? They lobotomized him?”

“They sometimes did, yes, under the various regimes,” Bucky said softly, his voice low and even. “The mutants they could not threaten or indoctrinate, they…operated on. The Wolf Spider there—the man you just beat, _milli moy_ , Niko Constantin—must have kept up the practice.”

“It was an honor,” came a slurred hate-filled voice from behind them. Niko was sitting up, his shattered arm hanging limply at his side. “The mongrel was useless otherwise; he served the Motherland well until today. But today he failed and so I put him down like the cur he was.” He gurgled a laugh, coughing blood. The Avengers stared at him in universal horror. There was nothing sane in his eyes anymore, just a chattering void. 

Behind him Bruce Banner had exited the quinjet and started trotting towards the group.

Before anyone could stop her, Bobbi used her staff to lever herself to her feet and vaulted over Thor’s head to land next to the Wolf Spider. With a snap she separated the staff into her batons again, placed the right one across his throat and pulled his back against her chest, her left arm hooked over the other end of the baton. She hauled him up and up, off his feet, choking him. There was death on her face. 

Bucky moved first and fastest, bumping Thor and Iron Man out of the way to grab the metal of the baton and pull it away from Niko’s throat as his eyes rolled up into his head.

“Hey,” he said gently, “remember that thing Avengers only do as a last resort?”

Bobbi snarled, jerking at her baton. “I’ll make an exception.”

“If anyone gets to make the decision, it’s me. And I’m still team leader. Mission’s not done yet,” he responded in a reasonable tone.

Her rage faded and she stepped back away from the Wolf Spider, semi-conscious. Bucky grabbed him by the front of his jacket when she pulled away her baton. 

“Right,” she said with a nod. “Right, I forgot—” she raised her voice, clearly speaking to the other Avengers. “I would like this mission on the record as being _not my bloody fault for once_? Officially!” 

“Duly noted,” Captain America said in a wry voice. 

She nodded firmly, took one step forward and flopped onto her knees. “Annnnnddd there goes the ankle.” She sat down heavily. “I need a hot bath and cold alcohol, preferably at the same time.”

Bruce, who’d joined them by now, looked up from making sure Niko was just unconscious and not choking to death. “As long as you have a spotter so you don’t slip under the water,” he said mildly.

Clint made a very complex noise, combining derision, surprise and contempt all at the same time. 

“Well, yes, I figured that,” Bruce responded with a smile.

Bucky looked over at Steve. “So, total mission failure, punk.”

Steve shook his head. “Hardly. Three days ago did we know these guys were active? Now they’re erased from the board. That’s a win in my book.” He frowned. “Don’t like the ‘pretending to be dead’ schtick though.”

“There’s three more up there,” Bucky gestured at the hill where the Roman monument stood. “As well as…um…this might take some explaining.”

“There’s a chair and equipment in the altar room. They tried to turn him back into the Winter Soldier so he could kill all of you. They told him to kill me first. Didn’t take—put me down!” Bobbi said rapidly, then exclaimed as Clint hoisted her into his arms, damsel in distress style. 

“Shaadup or I throw you to Thor and he carries you like a potato sack.”

“Or, maybe not,” Bucky said with a sigh. He looked around at the team. In the distance the two note sigh of European police cars was getting closer. “The thugs here can go with the police but the Wolf Spider—Niko—is more dangerous.”

Natasha had moved closer to the little man, now lying in recovery position breathing raggedly. “I think I remember a little about this program. They told _us_ none of the boys survived.” She sighed, looking cold and sad. 

Bucky shrugged awkwardly. “They must have socked him away as…insurance…or something. And then forgot about him.”

“Let them have him,” Bobbi said, viciously. “Let them send him back to whatever gulag he escaped from.”

“They’ll execute him this time, I think,” Bucky said to no one in particular.

Captain America was looking inward, deep in thought, then shook his head. “No. He’ll go to the Raft, so at least he MIGHT get help if he wants it. Buck, Bobbi, Nat, Clint and Sam take off. The rest of us will finish clean up and I’ll call for the jet later. Good work today, all.”

*****

Epilogue 1

Steve leaned back in the very hot water of Tony’s magnificent hot tub, looking up at the stars over Bucharest. He felt the usual contentment of a mission over, all his people home, safe. He was particularly pleased to see the camaraderie that Bucky and Bobbi were showing, markedly increased in just the last week. It pulled Buck into the “Spy Trio” dynamic of Nat and the Bartons. But there was something up with that threesome too. He’d have to get to the bottom of it.

Later. After a nice long rest. His ‘brother and sister’ were alive. Today was a good day. 

A splash of water hit him in the face. He opened his eyes to Sam and Bobbi facing off, clearly about to start a water fight.

‘Are you eight?” He said in an exasperated voice.

“Yes,” Bobbi replied mulishly. Sam laughed and settled back into the water himself.

Steve grinned a stood up, reaching for one of the heated towels stacked at the side of the tub. “I’m headed to grab a snack before bed. Back to New York in the morning,” he reminded everyone. 

“You not coming back?” Natasha asked as he stepped onto the beck.

“Wasn’t planning to, no,” Steve replied curiously, looking back over his shoulder. He stepped carefully on the still wet deck—the tub had over flowed a little when Thor had lowered himself into it.

The rest of the team exchanged looks.

“CLOTHING OPTIONAL IS A GO!” Howled Tony. 

The splat of six speedos and a brace of bikinis hitting the wooden slats next to Steve’s feet echoed it was so loud. Clint had thrown his over hand. 

Shaking his head and muttering “Children,” Steve wrapped his towel around his waist and went inside, followed by the laughter of his teammates. 

Butt of the joke or not, it sounded like a heavenly choir to him.

*****

Epilogue 2

_**WhatSuperApp Secure Messaging, Provided by Stark Industries** _

_Birdie19_ You there?

 _WakandAreThose?_ For you? Always.

 _Birdie19_ Remember that convo we had about memory triggers and psycho-chemical programming? Any progress?

 _WakandAreThose?_ I’ve been working on that in my off time! Very promising—if we get it right we won’t need to give anyone a concussion to free them from mind control! The test models are too simplistic though. 

_Birdie19_ My dear heart have I got a test subject for you …

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI the Tropaeum Traiani is not on a hill ... in OUR universe


End file.
